Fresh Updates from RAC

Despite the name’s implied simplicity, the Farm Bill is a collection of a wide range of polices. By cobbling together policy priorities for rural, urban and even suburban constituencies into a single piece of legislation, legislators can more readily build support for a bill that may otherwise lack appeal to Members of Congress who represent constituencies unaffected by specific provisions. Some of the polices folded into this behemoth of a bill are conservation initiatives.

The Farm Bill provides $4 billion a year in federal funding for land trusts and other conservation initiatives, making it the single largest source of such funds. In fact, the 2008 bill included over $23 billion in funds that directly or indirectly helped with wildlife habitat and water preservation and restoration. While it is easy to look at the bill’s name and assume that agricultural land is the primary focus of the bill, the reality is that all types of lands – public and private – have applicable provisions somewhere in the bill.

The nature of these various programs, combined of course with poverty reduction programs like SNAP, make this a piece of legislation that is steeped in Jewish tradition. Genesis calls on us to “till and guard” the earth (Genesis 2:15). The Farm Bill is about preserving (guarding) the earth as well as funding and establishing programs for farming (tilling). This commandment and, of course, our obligation to help the most vulnerable members of our society require us to support key provisions of the Farm Bill and work toward its expedited passage.

Image courtesy of USDA.

This excerpt is taken from a new post in the Jewish Energy Guide created by the Coalition for the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL). Rabbi David Seidenberg uses his website, Neohasid.org, to teach eco-Torah, including the environmental implications of Rainbow Day. He discusses the covenant God made with Noah, and how we should reflect more often on the rainbow covenant and our role in sustaining the environment.

Excerpt: Rainbow Day, which falls on the 42nd day of the counting of the omer, and the day after Yom Yerushalayim — Jerusalem Day — is a time to celebrate the diversity of life on Earth, and to remember our role in God’s covenant. It is a time to remember that the first covenant was not with human beings but with all living things, and it’s a chance to reflect on the deep spiritual and religious meaning of diversity, creation and our role as part of Creation and partners with God. This is a special time in human civilization when we need to reflect on the rainbow covenant and our place in sustaining a world where sowing and reaping, cold and hot, summer and winter will not stop.

Click here to read to the full post.

In the six months since Superstorm Sandy devastated coastal communities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, the Reform Jewish community has rallied to support the rebuilding effort, our synagogues, and the millions of people who were – and continue to be – impacted by the storm.

Although much of the Reform Movement’s work has been behind the scenes – raising and allocating funds, coordinating volunteers, and keeping abreast of the rebuilding efforts two of our synagogues are undertaking – our members have risen to the occasion. Countless volunteer hours have been applied to the cause, entire trailers of donated goods have been sent by our synagogues to some of the hardest-hit communities, and the URJ’s Disaster Relief Fund, which opened just after the storm passed, raised nearly $1 million for relief efforts.

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Happy Earth Day! While we at the RAC are working to pass legislation that helps mitigate the effects of climate change, there are champions for environmental stewardship working day-in and day-out at the congregational and community level to make change.

Paul Kaufman is a perfect example of someone who has made it his mission to protect our environment through community organizing. Kaufman has been a member of his synagogue, Temple Emeth in Teaneck, NJ, for 45 years. In that time, he has led his community as they have encouraged a focus on the environment through their 30-year-old environmental committee (that he founded “before it was mainstream”).

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It’s simple chemistry; water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit); when the temperature rises above 0, ice starts to melt. Our planet has existed for hundreds of thousands of years in precise balance between freezing temperatures at high elevations and at the poles and steadily more temperate and tropical temperatures the closer you stand to the equator. The central feature of this period in Earth’s geological history is the presence of large ice formations at the poles.

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Spending most of my life in a desert, I have an appreciation for (really love of) the beauty and wonder of dry scenes and desert plants. Bring on the hot, dry weather! However, living in a desert requires developing an appreciation for and love of water, especially rain, which is why I have become extremely concerned about the dry spell that has hit the United States during this past year. 80% of the agricultural land in the country has so far been affected.

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Ok everyone – listen up! I know over the last few years we have seen a minor uptick in extreme weather events. We had one two major hurricanes in the last decade, and they both have caused a lot of fuss. However, a new study estimates that for every one degree Celsius (or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit for us Americans) the average global temperature increases, the Atlantic coastlines of the U.S. could see seven (yes, seven!) times as many Katrina-sized storms.  That is a lot of potential damage, loss of life and economic disruptions that could be coming down the pike if we don’t start to undo some of the chemical changes we have made to the atmosphere.

Judaism’s commitment to the fundamental precepts of climate change is clear and, without question, our teachings call on us to actively seize every possible opportunity to reduce the damage we are doing to the climate. We are taught in Genesis that we were created to till and tend to the earth (Genesis 1:26); in other words, one of our obligations as part of creation is to ensure the long-term preservation of our environment. Indeed, it is our obligation to ensure the environmental inheritance gifted to us by our ancestors is intact or even improved upon for our descendants. As we bear witness to an ever-escalating series of disruptions, it is important that we remember our obligations to our children and grandchildren and do our utmost to ensure robust and stable ecosystems for them.

A paperless society sounds like a great idea. On the surface our migration from papers on our desks to files on our desktops seems to be an environmentally shrewd development. After all, how many reams of paper have we avoided consuming be sending emails instead of letters, posting to a website rather than publishing a book, or emailing a receipt instead of printing it. Sure, there is that whole conflict minerals problem, but we can at least take solace knowing we are saving the environment a little, right?

Not so much. It turns out our cloud-based computer habits are not nearly as green as we once thought and in fact often do a lot of damage to the environment. What does the ubiquitous “cloud,” which no one really understands anyway, require to function? Electricity and lots of it. That energy, like everything else, tends to come primarily from fossil fuels; thus, our paperless society is not doing nearly as much as we would like to curtail environmental degradation.

However, companies with large cloud-based infrastructures are aware of the problem and working to address it. Just recently, Apple, the company behind the iPhone, announced that its data centers, which power its iTunes store, iCloud and other cloud services, are operating on 100% green energy. After the minor controversy about their data centers a few years ago, when Greenpeace accused Apple’s servers as being the dirtiest in the industry, this is welcome news.

Google and Microsoft are also working to reduce the carbon footprint of their operations. We still have a long way to go, but at least progress is being made.

Image Courtesy of Hands on Tech.